Requiem for a Redbird longlisted for Book of the Year
On November 12th, 2024, the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia longisted Requiem for a Redbird for its Book of the Year. The organization’s mission is to nominate books that “capture the spirit and essence of northern Appalachia.”
Requiem for a Redbird is a collection meant to take its readers through five distinct yet interwoven sections; it's a book, in Bush's own words, that is unapologetically both Appalachian and Black. It is ultimately meant to be a work of joy and hope that points beyond itself: one that subverts the stereotypes of their home region, speaks truth to power, and seeks an open table of reconciliation. Appalachians of every background, minority communities, communities of faith, and anyone disillusioned with our country's political system can find something good, true, and beautiful in this book.
Pulley Press is proud to present a preview of Bush’s work with the poems, “To be Affrilachian” and “Call the melody”.
To be Affrilachian
is to be the coon
and the coon dog,
tree myself on the
highest branch to jump
noose tied, Judas:
guts bursting to make
love to the field
cause kissing my brother
is impossible.
I am both
not brown enough to be true
& just brown enough to be target,
and the white people I've
lived around my whole life
will ask why I put
my hands up,
take a knee,
can't breathe,
want to light
the stars
and bars on fire:
use the coal that killed my grandfather
and the sugar cane my mom's ancestors cut
to burn it like Sherman,
dust and ashes
consuming their "blood and soil."
The soil I grew up on
was West-by-God Virginia,
which is to say we have a
love affair with unions,
which is to say we know
how to teach old rich, white
bastards in suits a lesson.
To be Affrilachian
is to hold all of this
as a fire in my bosom
pen it down as a poem
under Holy Ghost inspiration;
call it a negro spiritual,
cause my soul is still south
of the Mason-Dixon
full of people whistling Dixie:
it is the old white man
with his four canine teeth
framing the black hole of his mouth
calling me Nigger!
on primary election day
in my hometown of Webster Springs
for holding a sign in protest:
We are all made in God’s image
and I stare into in his eyes
wanting to break all four frames
of that black hole
but I clutch the sign
bite my tongue
because my black mother, a poet, left her muse
to me as her dying gift after my birth,
and my white father, a sailor, taught me death
is the only thing to weep over:
her mother was a political revolutionary in Grenada,
his mother was a clerk and waitress in Webster Springs,
her father was a tailor in Barbados,
his father was a coal miner in Craigsville,
and I am an engineer in Bridgeport,
but that old stranger knew nothing of this.
Saw my skin and his eyes
went Fox News red as he said,
Fuck your Jesus.
Call the melody
a kind of witchcraft or medicine work.
She'd tell you
they might be one and the same
as she plays lead and follow on her fiddle:
an old time tune to call you away
to the mountains or rivers
along the footpaths of muses or nymphs
but not sirens, never sirens
because the tune is always
the refrain of life.
A sound beyond
the church, porch, pavilion, stage
guiding you home to the almanac
your grandmother once swore
by in her youth,
the prayer your grandpa
would breathe past the fence on the wind
carried downstream on the Elk
for you to finish school and find good work,
the haunt of your mother's grave calling
you to live into the name she birthed you into.
You come back to yourself:
she is still trading lead and follow,
the notes woven into your heart.
